Critique of Pure Reason

[Anonymous No.6916157]

>we can't perceive the noumenon, or 'real reality', because we only interact with sense impressions fed to our consciousnesses by our sense organs
>tabula rasa is false, because humans enter a world defined by a priori laws and truths: space, time, and morality

There. Is that all there is to it? Do I still need to read it?

[Anonymous No.6916176]

>hasn't seen a sense impression/idea/mental representation/sense datum or whatever you want to call it
>goes on to postulate the existence of this type of thing

everything that's wrong with Kant and contemporary mainstream cogsci that assume this axiomatically

yawn

[Anonymous No.6916179]

>>6916176
nothin personnel, kant

[Anonymous No.6916182]

>>6916157
That's it, now you have a duty to read Schopenhauer.

[Anonymous No.6916183]

Only read it if you're a federal ra, Aquinas argument still hasn't been refuted

[Anonymous No.6916185]

>>6916183
nor does it stand on its own

[Anonymous No.6916191]

>>6916183
>Aquinas argument still hasn't been refuted
Yeah, if you restrict yourself to Aristotelian Logic and sprinkle your premises with obscure notions.

Not a single argument of Aquinas is relevant these days since the advent of modern logic.

[Anonymous No.6916197]

>we can't perceive the noumenon, or 'real reality', because we only interact with sense impressions fed to our consciousnesses by our sense organs

Reminder that this means:
>we see our sight
>we hear our hearing
>we taste our taste

fucking retarded, it goes against common sense

Reminder that Aquinas debunked modern philosophy in a few sentences
>On the contrary, The intelligible species is to the intellect what the sensible image is to the sense. But the sensible image is not what is perceived, but rather that by which sense perceives. Therefore the intelligible species is not what is actually understood, but that by which the intellect understands.

In other words, we don't see our senses, our senses are that by which we see actual THINGS ("noumena" if you like). I don't see my sight of a man's face, my sight of a man's face is that by which I see HIM, an actual substance.

Modern philosophy is insanity.

[Anonymous No.6916198]

>>6916183
Fallacy of composition, modal specticism. Voila.

[Anonymous No.6916200]

What's the difference between Kant's "noumenon" and Plato's "forms"?

[Anonymous No.6916202]

>>6916183
>>6916198
Rekt.

[Anonymous No.6916208]

>>6916200
Noumenon is basically all that there is including what we can't percieve, with phenomenon being what we can. Forms are perfect forms existing outside of the material world, that material objects and our ideas try to emulate.

[Anonymous No.6916219]

>>6916157

What do you honestly think OP? That all those pages can be translated into those two lines of yours? No, OP, you fucking idiot, that is not all there is to it.

[Anonymous No.6916222]

>>6916197
>we see our sight
>we hear our hearing
>we taste our taste

But that's not what Kant says.
We see a thing *by means* of sight
We hear a thing *by means* of hearing
We taste a thing *by means* of taste

The subject impresses himself on the thing, which is noumenon until the point that an ape with understanding and time and space wraps his mind around it, at which point noumenon sinks beneath the phenomenon. It's not that different from what your Aquinas quote says.

[Anonymous No.6916225]

>>6916208
>perfect forms existing outside of the material world, that material objects and our ideas try to emulate

Is that not a rephrasing of OP's account of the noumenon?

>we can't perceive the noumenon, or 'real reality', because we only interact with sense impressions fed to our consciousnesses by our sense organs

Is the OP incorrect?

[Anonymous No.6916230]

>>6916225
We can percieve the 'real reality' just not all of it; I'm probably getting abit kantian-schopenhaurian here tho, so I'm sure someone more grounded in Kant can tell you if he made a noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy

[Anonymous No.6916234]

>>6916225
Yes, platos forms and Kants noumena are both hyperdimensional objects

[Anonymous No.6916239]

>>6916157
2lacan4me

[Anonymous No.6916252]

>greatest book the west has ever produced
>nah, shouldn't read it I have a two sentence summary fam

[Anonymous No.6916255]

>>6916222
>We see a thing *by means* of sight
>We hear a thing *by means* of hearing
>We taste a thing *by means* of taste

No, this is not what Kant is saying. He is literally saying that we can't see things. He is saying that we see our sight and hear our hearing.

[Anonymous No.6916261]

>>6916222
>The subject impresses himself on the thing, which is noumenon until the point that an ape with understanding and time and space wraps his mind around it, at which point noumenon sinks beneath the phenomenon.

This is just poetic nonsense.

[Anonymous No.6916263]

>>6916255
Ok I see what you're saying. But I'm not sure how it goes against "common sense," and how the Aquinas quote doesn't also.

[Anonymous No.6916272]

>>6916263
Common sense tells us that we don't see our own sight. Common sense tells us that we see things.

Saying that we see our own sights plunges us into a navel-gazing world where our minds are the measure of things, where the universe is inside our heads. It's the error that eastern philosophies often make.

[Anonymous No.6916288]

>>6916272
but we do "see our own sight" in the sense that what we perceive is the data gained from our eyes decoded in the brain

[Anonymous No.6916352]

>>6916255
I said thing, not thing-in-itself. We are saying essentially the same thing at this point, but I don't think it's against common sense to say our measure of the world doesn't contain the whole picture.

If you are a Thomist, it should be easy for you to imagine this in terms of God looking at the world from his seat of timeless-spacelessness. God would see a noumenal realm hidden by the construction of our minds.

>>6916261
Kant honestly doesn't even care about the noumenon. He just needs it as a concept to resist the icky conclusion of "We as humans know absolutely everything." He saves metaphysics, even though he thinks metaphysics is useless, in order to prevent materialism from destroying the priority of consciousness. The gap between Rationalism and Empiricism was threatening to annihilate all of philosophy, and all pursuit of knowledge, and Kant created a synthesis.

Kant is just saying that the mind is the seat of the world. Asking what the noumenon is is like asking someone to invent a sixth sense. I think we know a sixth sense should be possible on some level, but we just can't grasp it.

It's a tough subject for us as positivist materialists - much easier pill to swallow for Enlightenment and Romanticism thinkers. I'm not sure where current scholarship is on the issue, though I hear Neo-Kantians don't even care about the noumenon anymore.

I'm sure some of this is wrong/poorly worded, but I'm trying to remember the philosophy for myself at the same time as I try to explain it, which is rough.

[Anonymous No.6916394]

>>6916157
switch to godel

[Anonymous No.6916408]

>>6916252
>>greatest book the west has ever produced
reminder that synthetic a priori has been debunked

[Anonymous No.6916447]

>>6916222
>>6916255
>He is literally saying that we can't see things. He is saying that we see our sight and hear our hearing.

buddha went further than this little analysis via his dependent origination.

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/depend.htm

>>6916272
>It's the error that eastern philosophies often make.
elaborated this point please.

[Anonymous No.6916461]

Ditch the mysticism and get a job.
A=A. my Comprachicos.

[Anonymous No.6916469]

>>6916461

[Anonymous No.6916481]

>>6916469
>Popper
That pic desperately needs an update.

Let me work on it.

[Anonymous No.6916488]

>>6916481
Can't wait to see it, pal

[Anonymous No.6917582]

The noumenon was just a repeating of the Leibnizian "best God" argument. Why are things this way, well, because a trancedental source must gurantee the existance of the categories and teh physical laws o the universe.

It's a cop-out and I'm certain Kant knew it was a contradiction in his thinking , but he kept it in order to not be acused of atheism.

[Anonymous No.6917594]

>>6916408

It's not that it has been debunked, but more or less completely ignored as a question. Quine discarded it as a non-argument.

[Anonymous No.6918434]

>>6916157

This thread contains plenty of mistakes - maybe because people didn't actually read the first critique, or the ones that followed, in which
case you have your answer, OP. I'll post further, explaining the errors.

But even if Kant's claims about sensibility and understanding, and therefore about noumena, had been accurately summarized in this thread, there is much more to them, and to the Critique of Pure Reason in general, that would be overlooked. Only you can decide whether it's worth knowing more about Kant than what's contained in your two sentences, based on how much you care about philosophy, how well you want to understand the history of philosophy after the 1780's, and what special areas of interest appeal to you.

You really won't get a solid grasp of Kant's doctrine of the synthetic a priori without understanding these largely separate faculties of the mind and the pure laws that characterize each of them, and to have such a grasp requires either soldiering through the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, or reading a detailed scholarly study.

The other omissions that especially come
to mind are Kant's detailed arguments in the Transcendental Dialectic, which I think are among his most fascinating and thrilling, against the possibility of theoretically proving, for example: the substantiality of the human soul (against Descartes); the boundedness or unboundedness of the physical world in
space and time, and the incompatibility of the deterministic chain of natural causes with the transcendental freedom of the human will (absolutely crucial for understanding Kant's moral philosophy); the existence of god from ontological, cosmological, and teleological argumentation (against Anselm, and Aquinas, and Aristotle, and basically everyone).

What's more, Kant discusses the difference between constitutive principles of reason and regulative principles of reason, which is a distinction that permeates his whole philosophy; and by grasping the first critique, which focuses on the subsuming power of judgment that governs theoretical experience, you'll be in a position to understand what's unique about aesthetic experience, which arises from the reflecting power of judgment, discussed in the third critique. These discussions are more particular and specialized, but will be important if you're interested in the philosophy of science and/or the philosophy of art.

Corrections to follow.

[Anonymous No.6918664]

>>6916176

Well guess what we have science that could see the real reality kant only theorised

suck my dick fag. 1.000 years from now when humans conquer physicality and will be able to transcend into the "real reality" and the virtual reality at wiil, Kant will be seen as the father of the then modern world. Just you wait and see

[Anonymous No.6918899]

>>6916176
>>hasn't seen a sense impression/idea/mental representation/sense datum or whatever you want to call it

For Kant, a perception is a kind of mental representation - one that includes sense impressions (AKA sensory data) as an element. The other element in perception is conceptual organization (AKA the pure forms of thinking) provided by the understanding. When the two combine, they yield the law-governed regularity of experience that allows consciousness to arise. You can't "see" in consciousness any raw sensation, since apart from the concepts of the understanding, there would be no conscious subject to do the seeing; your sensations would be like the images on a movie screen with no audience present. And likewise, if you only had the pure concepts, spinning away without any sensory content to think about, your consciousness would never have arisen. Perception presupposes raw sensation and pure concepts in Kant's system - it's only after experience is a given fact that we can reflect upon it and isolate its different elements via transcendental philosophy.


>>6916197
>Reminder that this means:
>>we see our sight
>>we hear our hearing
>>we taste our taste
>fucking retarded, it goes against common sense

That's a very misleading way to put it. For Kant, to have a visual experience of an object represented externally in space is to see that object (AKA to have sight of it); to have a tactile experience of an object represented externally in space is to touch it; etc. But your body and its sensory organs, along with the objects it sees and touches and hears and tastes, is merely appearance, phenomena, like everything in space and time. Even your stream of thought in inner sense - your memories, desires, emotions, personality traits - is phenomenal, empirical, merely how you appear to yourself. The self that is most fundamental, grounding these representations of inner sense and outer sense, is the transcendental self (AKA the transcendental unity of apperception); it is the subject of experience that cannot further become an object of experience. It is this deepest self that, I guess, can be said to "see" your sight and "hear" your hearing, though I'm confident this isn't what you meant, and the more accurate way to say it would be that the transcendental self is conscious of your seeing and hearing and sensing in general.

Maybe you were thrown off by the term

>sense organs

but strictly speaking (and despite Kant's occasionally misleading writing), the sensory data of experience doesn't come from these, since they are themselves spatiotemporal objects; rather, sensations come from our receptive faculty of cognition, called "sensibility," which isn't empirical, but transcendental.

And since when is common sense the arbiter of truth? It can lend plausibility to an argument, sure, but it's also what has led so many people to believe that the sun orbits the earth, and that denying the antecedent is a valid form of argument.

[Anonymous No.6919150]

>>6916222
>>6916255

There's ambiguity here that stems from a failure to distinguish the empirical object from the thing-in-itself. >>6916352 points this out.

According to Kant, we see an empirical object by means of sight, we hear an empirical object by means of hearing, we taste an empirical object by means of taste.

But we do not see, hear, or taste the thing-in-itself. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is what we must think of as a ground of the empirical object's sensible characteristics; that is, when the particular constitution of the human mental faculties meets with the unknowable constitution of the thing-in-itself, the consequence is our experience of the world of empirical objects, each empirical object having a determinate size and shape and color and temperature, having a determinate composition of parts comprising its physical wholeness, and having a determinate place in the order of causes and effects. For Kant, the noumenal is required as a correlate of the phenomenal, since he takes it to be absurd that there could be appearances without that which appears (or, more precisely, appearances are consequences, given undeniably in experience, that require some ground-in-general as correlate).

While >>6916352 was correct to point out the distinction between thing as appearance and thing-in-itself, s/he is incorrect on the following:

>Kant honestly doesn't even care about the noumenon. He just needs it as a concept to resist the icky conclusion of "We as humans know absolutely everything."

Kant does care about the noumenal. As is evident from his second critique in particular, Kant's moral philosophy requires noumena like immortal souls, free wills, and God (the conceptual distinctions between these things is important, even if in the noumenal domain there can't be spatiotemporal differentiation of the sort that individuates empirical objects). It's not "just" a matter of denying human omniscience - it's also a matter of preserving human (transcendental) freedom and moral responsibility.

>he thinks metaphysics is useless

This is a common claim, but Kant himself endorses metaphysics, but of a critical rather than a dogmatic kind. His problem wasn't with metaphysics per se, but with all metaphysics that, devoid of what he saw as the proper method, flew into extravagance. After all, his "Groundwork" purports to supply the basis of a metaphysics of morals (and he eventually published a "Metaphysics of Morals,") just as in the theoretical domain he used the Critique of Pure Reason to deduce "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science."

At least s/he can admirably recognize the probability of inaccuracies like these (and I'll probably get forgetful once I'm equally distant from my reading of Kant).

[Anonymous No.6919796]

>>6916157
No, his ideas on semantics, judgement, and concepts are more important.

[Anonymous No.6920123]

>>6919796

Semantics - that's interesting. What do you see as his contribution to that field?

The only thing that comes to my mind is the difference between predicating something of phenomena vs. predicating it of noumena; for example, the meaning of "thing" in an empirical respect is different from the meaning of "thing" in a purely intelligible respect.

[Anonymous No.6920161]

>>6916272
We *intuit* light, colors, shapes, etc. through our sense of sight. This sense and the sensed objrcts are noumenal because we cant know them in an unconditioned way. Sight doesn't see sight. I don't know where you get the idea that that was all Kant was saying.

[Anonymous No.6920169]

>>6918434
>>6918899

Ily

[Anonymous No.6920171]

>>6920161
Or rather, we sense those things through sight, which we intuit.

[Anonymous No.6920524]

>>6918434
I've read your posts and enjoyed them.

I've been meaning to read Kant for a while but admittedly I've been a bit apprehensive.

I know I could probably find a guide or something like that, but considering you seem to have a bit of knowledge I'd just like a personal opinion.

To start off, did you read them in English? Which editions?

And at the moment I'm most interested in
>the incompatibility of the deterministic chain of natural causes with the transcendental freedom of the human will

Am I correct in understanding that his discussion is in the Transcendental Dialectic?

I know I could probably just look this all up but I'd love to have your personal touch on it if it isn't too much to ask.

[Anonymous No.6920624]

>>6920524
Dang, in retrospect I look like a little bitch asking someone to hold my hand.

I'll just dive right in instead.

[Anonymous No.6920677]

>>6919150
>>6918899
those death masks

Ugh, I really didn't want to see Kant like that. Now I have to have this picture in my mind intermittently whenever I think about Kant, when I thought about him like this.

[Anonymous No.6920724]

>>6918899
Oh and good posts btw, even though the death masks made me kinda ugh, learned a lot. I'm already reading Kant's Logic and I got enthused reading your posts. I can now delve into Kant with more passion.

[Anonymous No.6921094]

>>6918434
would you say that decomposition from Kant of the perception of phenomenon matches the one of buddha

>>6916447
>>http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/depend.htm

also, would say that, if you remove god from kant's work, the transcendental self of Kant matches the lack of permanent self [ie traits of character etc] of the exposition of buddha

[Anonymous No.6922025]

>>6920524
>>6920624

Apprehensiveness might be better than unmerited confidence, since such confidence would probably be shattered into discouragement by Kant's density. I'd suggest minimizing your apprehensiveness by reading, if you haven't already, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume - their essential works on knowledge and metaphysics, or a good study of them. I can personally recommend the fourth and fifth volumes of Copleston's history (and his sixth volume is pretty kickass too, either as a summary of all you've learned once you finish reading Kant, or as a preparation and guide if you find Kant's own writing too difficult on its own).

Also, you'll gain a LOT if you read every article on Kant from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. The article on Kant's account of time and space especially stood out to me, and clarified much of what Kant means when de distinguishes the intuitive nature of human sensations from the discursive nature of human concepts.

And don't feel foolish for seeking advice - you might be more likely to misunderstand Kant without the guidance of authoritative introductions, articles, and studies, so you shouldn't feel weak for requesting pointers from a fellow struggler.

Most of what I've read comes from the Cambridge collection of Kant's works, translated into English, primarily by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (theoretical philosophy) and Mary Gregor (practical philosophy), at least for the works I sought out. The only major exception was the "Prolegomena," which I read in the Hackett edition.

And as for Kant's argument that the physical (and even psychological) determinism of nature is compatible with transcendental freedom of the will, you're right that its foundational treatment occurs in the Transcendental Dialectic, in the section on the antinomies; the third antinomy brings it up, and Kant's very extended commentary on the conflict and its solution provides a key premise for his later critiques. Critique of Practical Reason elaborates on the argument too, but I can't recall exactly where (I think its spread throughout that work); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is also relevant in the context of that argument; and I haven't read Metaphysics of Morals, so I can't say about it.

You could of course try to read just those excerpts where the argument is developed, but I doubt they'd make much sense - and even of you absorb a lot of what's being claimed, I expect there will be tons of richness left on the page.

[Anonymous No.6922509]

>>6916272
I find it somewhat easier to think of it scientifically. It is false to say we see their being. I am laying on my bed right now, tying on my laptop. My bed sheets absorb the colors from the spectrum put on it by the light from my window and it does not absorb the blue. I am not seeing the sheet, I am seeing the blue. I am laying on it, and I think I am feeling the mattress, but I am feeling the force it exerts up at me. One never senses matter, one senses the ways one's body reacts to the forces of it.

[Anonymous No.6922616]

>>6922509
This is classic enlightenment thought. Read Hegel.

[Anonymous No.6922625]

>>6922509
what would you say if you did not have heard of all these physical models ?

[Anonymous No.6922698]

>>6920677
Always found that portrait rather strange. The angle, him staring away. Never seen it used again, at least from that period.

[Anonymous No.6922728]

>>6922698
It hides the fact that he's a hobgoblin pretty well though

[Anonymous No.6922820]

>>6918434
>>6918899
>>6919150
>>6922025

thank goodness for anons like you, who can make a philosopher usually thought of as stuffy and necessary come to life. my local used bookstore has a cambridge edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, with annotations and Kant's notes from his original copy; I think I'll pick it up now. I probably won't get into for some time; I'm in the middle of some work with Nietzsche and Freud, but it seems as though Kant could be illuminating w/r/t to both of those thinkers: to Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in general and to Freud's theory of libidinal cathexis. thanks again anon.

[Anonymous No.6922824]

>>6922820
and unnecessary*

[Anonymous No.6923025]

>>6920677

Better?

I was really excited when I found images that were so close to what Kant actually looked like. They led me to believe that the portrait you posted, and which I like very much, is much more accurate than many other depictions floating around.

>>6920724
>>6922820

I'm very glad you feel that way! Kant's ideas are so powerful and so fun, and there's such a feeling of accomplishment to extracting the meaning behind his walls of words - even being surprised by the occasional passages of beauty - that I'm happy to find people who are interested in his work.